Saints Peter and Paul – the steady fisherman and the fiery Pharisee, the devoted disciple and the persecutor-turned-apostle. Every congregation is filled with Peters and Pauls – which one are you?

In Peter we see the Christian who has been raised in the church. Peter has no dramatic conversion experience, no abrupt shift from darkness to light; rather, he has spent a long time in the company of those who follow the Lord, and he has come to know that Jesus is the Messiah, the Anointed One of God. Peter’s faith is not dramatic, but it is solid – so much so that our Lord declares that the faith he shows, the acknowledgement that Jesus is the Christ, will be the rock upon which he will build the Church.

Not that the path has always been straight – definitely not! For only moments after he declares his faith, he tries to dissuade Jesus from the way of the Cross, only to be sternly rebuked.

While getting ready for church last Sunday morning, the first Sunday of 2011, I had the television tuned to Charles Stanley. Not Andy Stanley, Charles’ hip pastor son who is the envy of young ministry leaders everywhere, but the senior Stanley, with his ill-fitting hairpiece, and much-too-big suit.

You don’t get cool relevance from Charles. He’s strictly old school, which is to say he doesn’t coddle his audience by trying to make them feel like they’re at the center of the world. Like the apostle Paul, Charles Stanley is all about “Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

What caught my attention on this particular Sunday was Stanley’s insistence that the follower of Christ needs to be about principles, not preferences. This is very un-hip and very non-emergent, which is why it got my attention. Talking about principles is like talking about absolute truth, and everybody knows how irrelevant that is today. It just doesn’t fit with a culture that likes to have options and choices. In other words, preferences.

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It is less a contrast than it is a similarity. Two men, both highly educated Jews, both bold and passionate preachers of the message of the Gospel, both leaders in the first century Church.  Paul and Apollos were both used by God to build His Kingdom in the precarious, turbulent infancy of the Christian faith.  But only one of these men still has a ministry today.  Indeed, Paul’s contribution to the New Testament is central to our understanding of the Gospel.

Why is Paul’s influence greater than that of Apollos?  Spiritual calling aside, there seems a simple reason:  He Wrote Stuff Down.

I’m a big Writer of Stuff.  I have To-Do lists, archives of song lyrics, sermons and speeches, unpublished books and written meanderings.  According to the stats counter, my personal blog site just hit 100 blog entries last week.  I even have an archive of carefully documented calendars that stretches back to my freshman year in college, which I can’t bear to throw out.  What if I suddenly need to know what I did during the summer of 1984?

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Last night I attended a screening of Dan Merchant’s new Michael Moore-esque documentary, Lord Save Us From Your Followers.  It’s a film about how Christians have a huge PR problem and how “the culture wars” are exactly the opposite of what Christians should be battling in this world. The real war concerns things like poverty, injustice, and loving the unlovable, suggests Merchant. If Christians just loved better, befriended drag queens, and washed homeless people’s feet, our image crisis would go away.

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Many fundamentalists thrive on violently murdering honest biblical interpretation. I have seen it happen to others and myself: a sound scholastic reading of the Bible is presented and is denied because it doesn’t fit within religious parameters. Let’s talk about the fundamentalists, the serial killers of sound biblical interpretation, and see whose the real literalist: me or them?

First, let’s define fundamentalism:

1. A movement in 20th century Protestantism emphasizing the literally interpreted Bible as fundamental to Christian life and teaching
2. A movement or attitude stressing strict and literal adherence to a set of basic principles

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary

Now, from Merriam-Webster’s definition, I could almost (not quite) classify myself as a Christian fundamentalist. However, I don’t think the fundamentalists I know really understand what it means to be a literalist. If we are literalists, then we need to realize a few things, like the fact that God has spoken in other ways besides for His written Word (the Bible is not our only source for knowing about our God). Most fundies I know would say, “No way! God's ultimate plan of redemption is in the Bible and therefore there is no need for Him to speak anywhere else.” Well, there is a few problems with this kind of strict Bible-only view of God’s revelation. Let’s use the Bible as our starting point to show why this view murders honest biblical interpretation.

In Rom 1:19–20, when Paul is convincing the Romans why idolatry and worshiping  Graeco-Roman gods is wrong, he does not appeal to Scripture, but to creation: “For what can be known about God is plain … because God has shown it to [everyone]. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So [idolaters] are without excuse” (ESV). When anyone makes a choice to not follow the true God, Yahweh, as He is revealed through His Son, they are without excuse, not because He revealed Himself in the Bible, but because He revealed Himself in creation.

Oh, but the serial killing of this belief about how God speaks continues on—just look at how many times Acts 17 has been brushed over, or excused. Paul during his sermon at the Areopagus (commonly known as Mars Hill) quotes the Greek poet-philosophers Epimenides of Crete and Aratus (Acts 17:28) to explain the true God, Yahweh, and His plan of redemption through His Son. He also claims that the inscription to an unknown god on one of their altars is a reference to Yahweh (Acts 17:23). Paul synchronizes (on a very simple level) the religious beliefs of the Areopagus philosophers (and the Greeks in general) with Christianity. For Paul, God has revealed Himself in many different ways.

The above examples show that most fundies are actually not literalists. Because if they were, they would have a lot broader understanding of how God reveals Himself.

So, am I a biblical literalist? In the sense that I interpret the Bible based on what it actually says, Yes! But, am I a fundamentalist? Not in the sense of affirming a set of principles outside the Bible that deny things like God’s revelation happening in creation and other literature as well. But I am a fundamentalist in the sense that I affirm the basic set of principles God has commanded me in the Bible. The Bible is fundamental to Christian life and teaching, but as the above examples show, most fundies interpret the Bible within their set tradition and in doing so often don’t allow for it to be read literally. Please make the serial killing of honest biblical interpretation stop.

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I was reading the interestingly-titled and well-written "Why Are There Never Enough Parking Spaces at the Prostate Clinic" by Carl Trueman at Reformation 21 and a sentence in his last paragraph had an important conviction/reminder for me as a Christian who somewhat of a cultural commentator.

 

Trueman says, "Alternatively, I could try to move out of my own little world, start thinking less in cultural and more in biblical terms.  I could become less obsessed with particularities and more concerned with universals.  I could engage less with the accidents of culture and more with the substance of nature." [emphasis mine]

 

That is something I wanted to bring up, especially among all of the cultural conversation on this site.  We can get so busy scanning our culture like iTunes' "cover view" feature or flippantly analyzing every cultural flash in the pan and completely miss the point as Christians.  As Christians our lives are lived in view of eternity, in view of the one and only God who creates and sustains and who has revealed Himself to us in the Bible and continues to do so every day.  These facts carry with it some fundamental truths that we, in all of our contextualizing bluster, can skim right over: God has a nature and we have a nature.  That is exactly where the greatest Christian missiologist/apologist/evangelist started his Gospel presentation in the last half of the first chapter of Romans.

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